Several American Visual artists have joined together in a class action lawsuit against some popular AI image and video generation companies are celebrating today after a judge ruled their copyright infringement case against the AI companies can move forward toward discovery. The case was filed back in January of 2023.
The Artists involved include Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, Karla Ortiz, Hawke Southworth, Grzegorz Rutkowski, Gregory Manchess, Gerald Brom, Jingna Zhang, Julia Kaye, and Adam Ellis have, on behalf of all artists, accused Midjourney, Runway, Stability AI, and DeviantArt of copying their work by offering AI image generator products based on the open source Stable Diffusion AI model, which Runway and Stability AI collaborated on and which the artists alleged was trained on their copyrighted works in violation of the law.
While Judge William H. Orrick of the Northern District Court of California, which oversees San Francisco and the heart of the generative AI boom, didn’t yet rule on the final outcome of the case, he wrote in his decision that the “the allegations of induced infringement are sufficient,” for the case to move forward toward a discovery phase — which could allow the lawyers for the artists to peer inside and examine documents from within the AI image generator companies, revealing to the world more details about their training datasets, mechanisms, and inner workings.
“This is a case where plaintiffs allege that Stable Diffusion is built to a significant extent on copyrighted works and that the way the product operates necessarily invokes copies or protected elements of those works,” Orrick’s decision states. “Whether true and whether the result of a glitch (as Stability contends) or by design (plaintiffs’ contention) will be tested later. The allegations of induced infringement are sufficient.”
Artists react with glee.
“The judge is allowing our copyright claims through & now we get to find out all the things these companies don’t want us to know in Discovery,” wrote one of the artists filing the suit Kelly McKernan, on her account on the social network X. “This is a HUGE win for us. I’m SO proud of our incredible team of lawyers and fellow plaintiffs!”
© 2024 – 2025 GLOBAL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ACCORD CORPORATION ALL RIGHTS RESERVED